Arun Rath

Peter A. Smith Photography
/ NPR

Beginning in October 2015, Arun Rath assumed a new role as a shared correspondent for NPR and Boston-based public broadcaster WGBH News. He is based in the WGBH newsroom and his time is divided between filing national stories for NPR and local stories for WGBH News.

In this role, Rath's reporting beat covers the science of learning, exploring how the brain functions – how we experience emotions, making errors or boredom – and how we respond to different styles of learning. The beat dovetails well with several of WGBH News' core regional coverage areas, bolstering its reporting on higher education (On Campus), innovation (Innovation Hub) and science (Living Lab from WGBH and WCAI in Woods Hole on Cape Cod).

Previously he served as weekend host of All Things Considered. In that role, every Saturday and Sunday,Rath and the All Things Considered team offered an hour-long exploration of compelling stories, along with in-depth interviews, breaking news, cultural reviews and reports from NPR bureaus throughout the U.S. and around the world.

Over his career, Rath has distinguished himself in public media as a reporter, producer and editor, including time as a senior reporter for the PBS series Frontline and The World® on WGBH Boston. He began his journalism career as an NPR intern at an NPR call-in program called Talk of the Nation, eventually joining the staff and becoming the show's director after working on several NPR News programs during the 1990s. In 2000, he became senior producer for NPR's On the Media, produced by WNYC, where he was part of a team that tripled its audience and won a Peabody Award. He spent 2005 as senior editor at the culture and arts show Studio 360 from PRI and WNYC. Rath moved to television in 2005 to report and manage radio partnerships for Frontline; he also reports on culture and music for the PBS series Sound Tracks. At Frontline and The World®, Rath specialized in national security and military justice. He reported and produced three films for Frontline, the latest being an investigation of alleged war crimes committed by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq.

When Harry Selker was working as a cardiologist in the 1970s, clot-busting drugs were showing great promise against heart attacks. But their life-saving properties were very time sensitive. "If you give it within the first hour it has a 47 percent reduction of mortality; if you wait another hour, it has a 28 percent reduction; another hour, 23 percent. And people were taking about 90 minutes to make that decision," he recalls. "So they were losing the opportunity to save patients' lives."

The construction of Camp 5 at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay back in 2003 was taken as a sign that the prison was there to stay — "evolving from wire mesh to concrete," as reporter Charlie Savage wrote then in The Miami Herald. But today, because of a shrinking detainee population, Camp 5 is a thing of the past.

On the drive to Fairview Cemetery in the Boston neighborhood of Hyde Park, six seniors from Roxbury Latin boys' school sit in silent reflection. Mike Pojman, the school's assistant headmaster and senior adviser, says the trip is a massive contrast to the rest of their school day, and to their lives as a whole right now.

Today the teens have volunteered to be pallbearers for a man who died alone in September, and for whom no next of kin was found. He's being buried in a grave with no tombstone, in a city cemetery.

Sunday is my last broadcast as host of Weekend All Things Considered at NPR West. I'm moving back to Boston, and with packing well underway, after the broadcast I'll be sleeping between piles of hastily labeled boxes.

Weirdly, a couple of weeks ago I experienced a nightmare version of this very scene, when I attended a show called The Object Lesson at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, Calif.

"This is not respectable theater. I don't even know if it is theater," jokes Geoff Sobelle, the creator and star of the show.